Issue 97 - The Swedish Way

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The Swedish Way

Jefferson Chase heads north to investigate some excellent modern Scandinavian crime writing

At the excellent suggestion of our editor, this column will be heading north to investigate some Scandinavian crime fiction. But before we get to Stig Larsson, we're stopping off at another intriguing, less well-known novel, Kerstin Ekman's Blackwater.
The story kicks in the late 1960s with a young teacher named Annie arriving at a remote village in Northern Sweden, where she intends to join her boyfriend at a hippie commune. Her new life gets off to a very gruesome start.
Shortly after she and her daughter Mia get off the bus, they stumble upon two campers who have been stabbed to death:

Evensong came over the radio. A clergyman said you should deliver yourself unto the night. In the daytime we have problems to solve, he said. At night we deliver ourselves unto God. She thought about the two young people who had gone to bed in that tent and delivered themselves unto the bright night and its god.

The murder will haunt Annie and Mia for the rest of their lives.
And murder's not all that's happening on this fateful evening. The wife of a local doctor called Birger is in the process of leaving him, also to join the commune, and a local youth named Johan is cruelly lowered down a well by his tormenting half-brothers:

The light didn't reach down here. It was up above. He could see it. But it had no effect down here. The well shaft was too deep. Someone had dug and dug, confidently hopeful at first because the divining rod had turned down just there, then in sheer rage.